Art in the Village

How did an impoverished North
Philadelphia community transform abandoned lots into whimsical
sculpture gardens? How did six-story murals sprout on the sides of
crumbling buildings?

Walking through the
streets today, neighbors proudly call to point out to you the
once–forsaken lots—more than 120 of them—that today display colorful
murals. One of the murals is based on a painting of flowers first done
by neighborhood children and then painted three stories high on the
side of a building. Nearby a parade of angels representing the world's
faiths—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and others—guard a park and
create a haven for performances.

Blocks and
blocks of empty houses and fields of rubble have given way to these
murals, mosaics, and sculpture gardens. Streets better known for drug
dealing and joblessness now are interspersed with pockets of hope and
new community initiatives.

“All the gardens,
parks, and buildings should bring people joy,” says Lily Yeh, the
artist behind this transformation. “There should be a mystery to them;
their appearance is rooted in different cultural traditions, some of
which have distant and ancient origins.”

The
transformation of these blocks of North Philadelphia occurred over the
course of 18 years through the work of the Village of Arts and
Humanities. The Village, as it is called, is a nonprofit founded by
Lily, a painter and immigrant from China who left her tenured
professorship at the Philadelphia School of Fine Arts to reimagine and
remake a neighborhood with the people who live there.

Philadelphia is a city full of murals, but the Village did far more
than create beautiful places. The Village also spawned a daycare
center, a theater program that has sent neighborhood young people on
international tours, and a health project. Most recently, the Village
has launched “Shared Prosperity,” a program that aims to address the
community's economic ills.

The legacy of povertyNorth
Philadelphia is an African-American neighborhood with 30 percent
unemployment, an average annual household income of only $10,000, and
gentrification threatening from nearby Temple University.

Not long ago, drug dealers controlled the streets. In one block that is
now at the heart of the Village, three-quarters of the lots and
buildings were abandoned. Children had nowhere to go.

The Village is centered in an eight–square–block area near Germantown
Avenue and North 11th Street, where sculpture gardens and Village
programs are concentrated. This is where its first renovated buildings
and earliest art parks took shape, but the broader reach of the Village
spans 250 blocks.

Lily Yeh's story in North
Philly began 18 years ago, when a prominent local dancer invited her to
do something with the abandoned lot near his studio, one of hundreds in
the neighborhood. Children saw Lily (“a crazy Chinese lady”) cleaning
up the lot and wandered over to see what was up. They stayed to help,
eventually drawing in their parents.

One of
the first neighborhood adults to get involved was James “Big Man”
Maxton, who left a life as a drug runner to teach mosaic and masonry to
hundreds of residents.

“I was a lost soul in
the community, disconnected from my family, looking for a way to come
back to reality on the tail end of a 22-year drug addiction,” Big Man
recalled in a conversation before his untimely death in February.

Lily “wrapped her wings around me and taught me how to believe in
myself,” he said of his early days at the Village. “Only later did I
find out my work wasn't tremendous!”

Like Big
Man's journey, the Village unfolded slowly, with Lily and her crew of
children and street people creating an art park, then an open-air
coming-of-age ritual for young people. Next there was a teen program
and a project that trained local residents in construction and then
practiced by renovating the buildings that would house Village
programs.

All this happened under the radar
of the city of Philadelphia, whose city planners and social workers
were nowhere to be found in the neighborhood.

Lily's vision inspired funders who did not look too closely at who
owned the land that was being reclaimed (eventually the Village
negotiated ownership of the key lots).

As
local crews remade the buildings and lots, a sense of pride and
ownership developed among the construction crews, and by extension, the
whole community. “One of the most powerful things I learned,” says
Lily, “is that when you learn a skill and transform your immediate
environment, your whole life begins to change.”

Theater at the VillageIn
1992, civil rights elder and theater director H. German Wilson added
performance art to the built environment created by Lily, Big Man, and
the community construction crews.

The
Memorial Garden on Warnock Street, behind the Village's administration
building, became one of the Village's open-air performance spaces. This
garden contains totems—or “sticks in the ground” as one staffperson
calls them—and walls of tiles created by neighbors in memory of lost
ones.

The first play drew on Lily's
recordings of neighbors' stories; playwright Winston Jones wove the
stories into a script. Wilson directed the production, and the
neighbors were cast and crew.

The theater
productions have become a yearly tradition, with the script often
coming directly out of the young people's experiences. Word of the
productions has traveled; performances now take place not only in a
Village park, but in theaters in Mexico, Iceland, and elsewhere.

This year Wilson is working with playwright Richard Lamont Pierce on a
production called “Choices.” The play is about how mistakes can have a
deep effect on your life, says Wilson, and how “you have to stay in
school in order to make a choice.”

“The
performances and the art make everybody equal,” said Jamile Wilson, 18,
soon after he returned from a troupe trip to Iceland. “People from
other places who may have more than you do can see what it is you can
do.”

Philip Horn, director of the
Pennsylvania Council of the Arts and an early supporter of the Village,
echoed that view. The Village “changed the perception in the [wider]
community from ‘there's something wrong with these people' to ‘there's
nothing wrong with these people.'”

In
addition to the annual theater festival, the Kujenga Pamoja festival
(meaning “Together We Build” in Swahili) has become an annual fall
tradition. The festival culminates in a coming-of-age ritual that was
one of the Village's earliest contributions to the neighborhood.

mural
by Lily Yeh

“We transformed a
physical space into a ritual space,” Lily recalls. “We cleansed the
grounds and put candles everywhere, not just in the park, but on the
sidewalks. The youth were prepared—they'd been through summer job
training together and had been camping. The whole community held
torches as we walked into the sacred space, and then we took pledges by
the fire to be a foundation to the community. We will respect our
elders. We will be the light of the future.”

Over the years, the Village continued looking for opportunities to
create sacred spaces—to express, as Lily put it, “that everybody has an
inner light, that each is equal, and together we can burn like a big
torch.” One garden might host a celebration to mark the end of a term
of the children's programs, another might host a winter festival. Last
September's coming-of-age ritual inaugurated a new labyrinth the youth
built in the Village's tree farm, and had Lily passing the torch on to
the new Village director, playwright and performer Kumani Gantt.

The Village has won international recognition, including the Rudy
Bruner Award for Urban Excellence in 2001. Lily herself is the
recipient of a 2003–2005 Leadership for a Changing World award, jointly
presented by the Ford Foundation and the Advocacy Institute.

A global canvasThe
Village has begun a new phase. The new director plans more training in
video production and the digital arts for teens. A hip–hop festival
will be held in September that will close off nearby Germantown Avenue,
fill the parks, and attract customers to area merchants, while
presenting the art form most embraced by younger residents. And vacant
lots will be transformed in a wider range of ways as defined by the
community—by creating basketball courts, for instance.

While focusing on what it does well—in youth work, performance, and
greening and stabilizing the land—the Village also is recognizing its
limitations. Through its newly launched Shared Prosperity project, the
Village plans to invite allies to help with economic development and
with the creation of quality housing beyond the six residential
buildings the Village has already fixed up.

So the Village continues to change and grow. Lily is returning to the
Village to create the Institute for Creative Learning to share what
she's learned about creating community art in partnership with people
living in some of the poorest communities.

Abby
Scher is a free-lance writer living in New York. Abby met Lily Yeh as a
fellow in the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World
Program. Until recently, she was director of Independent Press
Association–New York, a network of immigrant and other culturally
diverse press, and editor-in-chief of its free web weekly Voices That
Must Be Heard; see www.indypressny.org .

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